Yu-Gi-Oh’s animation rotation
Taking a break from comparing the manga to the anime so I can specifically talk about something related to the anime: the animation rotation. While Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters was produced by Studio Gallop, they didn’t actually animate every episode in-house. In total, they only animated 55 episodes in-house, while handling the layout on 7 more. They didn’t even handle their own episode until episode 4!
Duel Monsters typically operated on a 6-episode rotation involving usually 4 companies, where 2 companies had 1 episode each during that rotation, and the other 2 companies had 2 episodes each.
Early on, Duel Monsters had enough companies working on the show where each company needed only one team each in the rotation.
You can see that the show was kicked off not by Gallop’s in-house team but by Yumeta Company. Long-time fans of the series will recognize Yumeta Company, more specifically animation director Takahiro Kagami, as the one behind many of the best-looking episodes in the series.
The “Studio Dub” team is a little unclear. No animation cooperation credit is given in their episodes (6, 12, 18, 25), which would lead you to think that this is a second Gallop team. However, most of the animators from these episodes never worked on any other Gallop episodes, and the ones that did only worked on episodes where Studio Dub is credited as one of the assisting key animators (there were several companies, including Dub, who worked on key animation in a secondary role on many episodes). The Japanese Wikipedia article for the series also lists Studio Dub in parentheses for the production cooperation credit. Therefore I’m going to treat them as a separate entity from Gallop’s in-house episodes.
Group TAC only lasted two episodes (5 and 11), and they were replaced with a second in-house team by Gallop. Additionally, Studio Dub and Yumeta Company traded places in the rotation beginning in episodes 24 and 25.
Dub and JCF out, Dangun in
Big changes at the beginning led to the longest rotation group of the series, albeit with a few times where companies traded places. Studio Dub’s departure led to a new company, Dangun Pictures, joining the rotation, while JCF was replaced by a second team by SSC. For nearly 100 episodes, Duel Monsters stuck to this 6-episode rotation of having Gallop and SSC handle 2 episodes per rotation and having Yumeta and Dangun handle 1 episode. As far as minor changes, Gallop and Dangun traded places in the rotation beginning in episodes 56 and 57, and then Gallop traded both of their spots with SSC beginning in episodes 119 and 120 as well as episodes 122 and 123.
You may notice that episode 74 is missing from this chart. This is technically a Gallop episode (meaning that they handled back-to-back episodes for episodes 74 and 75), however it was a recap episode that credited all 4 companies. Kenichi Hara is the only credited key animator, handling all of the new footage present in this episode. As far as the episode rotation goes, episode 74 is essentially an extra episode that exists outside the rotation.
Gallop drops a team, Dangun adds one
As Dangun adds a second team, it moves SSC’s second team and Yumeta down a spot while Gallop drops their second team. SSC’s second team soon returned to its previous spot, however, after it traded spots with Dangun’s second team beginning in episode 145.
Like with episode 74, episode 144 is an extra episode not in the rotation, as it is a recap episode credited to all 4 companies, while Ikkou Kobayashi of Gallop did all the key animation for the new footage.
The short-lived 5th company
SSC dropped one of its teams, and for two rotations its spot was filled by a new company, JEM. Not much more to say here. You can tell though that a new company worked on episodes 154 and 160 because a lot of the characters are off-model.
Gallop outsources all its episodes to Dong Woo
For the remainder of the Doma arc, Gallop stopped animating its episodes in-house. Gallop animators would handle layout for their episodes, and then the actual animation would be handled by Dong Woo Animation. Gallop/Dong Woo took over JEM’s short-lived spot, and beginning in episodes 174 and 175 traded spots in the rotation with SSC.
Episode 184 is another episode that credited all the companies and features a significant amount of clips from previous episodes, but this episode was actually part of the rotation and had a full team of animators working on it.
Gallop is back, Yumeta is out
Beginning in episode 187, Gallop returned to handling their episodes in-house without the need to outsource to Dong Woo, meanwhile the other Dong Woo team was replaced with the return of SSC’s second team. Yumeta, however, exited the show after their last episode of the Doma arc, being replaced by a new company, Mook Animation, for the remainder of the series. Like with JEM before, you can tell its a new company working on those episodes because there’s a lot of off-model characters.
Episode 224, the series finale, is a unique episode that exists outside the rotation. It was a combined effort by Gallop’s team as well as both of SSC’s teams.
I hope this post was insightful! Join me next time as I list off who the animation directors were for each and every episode!
